by David Brooks
But if things were easier in the marriage, the kind of scar tissue Daniel might have hoped for over his feelings for Jennifer never formed. He could accept that the relationship was over, could consciously, intellectually, let go of her, but his subconscious would not do so. For a year, absurdly, almost as if he was to see her again – almost as if this were imminent – there were nights when he could do nothing but think of her, much as he tried to do otherwise, imagining over and over the moment she would come through the door, the intense, precarious seconds of their greeting.
And at some point, in the depths of one such night, unable to control where his sleeping mind wandered, he found her again – and for months, in his dreams, they were walking together, talking, touching, involved in long, intense, emotional discussions, making languid or rapid, unsettling love, so vividly, so hotly sometimes that he had more than once to wrench himself from sleep before climax.
One night, at the end of the second week of a new opera – Margaret was playing Turandot – and nearly eight months since he had last seen Jennifer, there was a cast party. He went, for an hour, but did not feel well and left, insisting that Margaret stay on, as indeed she seemed only too keen to do, to receive some of the acclaim she deserved. He had been experiencing a dizziness and nausea that had come and gone for weeks, but had never been strong enough to drive him to a doctor, and never yet as bad or intense as this. In the parking lot he had to steady himself beside the car, fighting and, staggering to a garden bed, giving in to a sudden need to vomit, after which the nausea passed and he felt able to drive. On the Canterbury Road, minutes later, he had to stop again, while another wave passed. At home, sweating, with a headache that returned with any large or sudden movement, he took aspirin, went directly to bed – it was already near midnight – and fell almost immediately into a hot, uneasy sleep.
They were making love in a room overlooking a canal. There were others in the house and, afraid they would be interrupted, he and Jennifer left, but, moving faster and faster along corridors that led deeper and deeper in, away from the light, they eventually encountered the very people they had been trying to avoid. These people took her – she was confused, and thought it better to go with them – and he followed, but a crowd coming toward them in the tunnel got in the way and he lost track of her. When the crowd cleared he was in a dark place of drains and dripping water, and people in pain. He heard cries from somewhere and knew that she needed him, that he should go back – she was lying there bleeding; for he was also with her, could see her, at the same time as he was lost and trying to find her – but he could find no way to her. Every door was opened by someone who could not understand him, or who wanted him to talk to them, to help them with something, an architectural project, a plan for an opera, something wrong with a light switch, a tap. And all the time she was lying there, bleeding and in agony in the room he could not get to, and he, when the others would let him, when he could get away, was running, running.
When Margaret woke him it was two-thirty in the morning. She had just returned from the party in a taxi, buoyant, smelling of alcohol and perfume and cigarettes. She had been dancing, she said, and could have gone on all night, but had come home because he was not well, and here he was with a high temperature, the sheets wet with fever. She went to get him more aspirin and to wrap ice in a towel that he could hold against his brow. While she did so he got up, went to the toilet. By the time he was half-way back to the bed he was shivering, intensely cold, could barely move his legs for a sudden strange stiffness in them. He covered himself with the blankets, dreading the rest of the night, but went almost immediately back to sleep and woke the next morning not only to bright sunshine and the illness gone, but an uncanny exhilaration, a lightness he could not explain.
That is how it would be, for two decades. A world of strange auguries, resonances, correspondences, things that were and were not themselves. It took him some time – two or three years – before he began to realise the source of them, but once he had, and was sure, there was not an unusual pain or ache or anxiety that would not have him thinking of her, trying to imagine; not an inexplicable joy or sudden, spiritual lifting that would not be redoubled in the thought that she might somehow be the source of it. He would turn, and she would be there in his mind, a perpetual companion, whether he spoke with her or not. More than once a dreadful interval came upon him, building to a day of apprehensiveness so cold and oppressive that he was driven to search for some sign of her in the newspapers or on the radio, looking for the disaster that might have involved her, scouring the death columns for her name. More than once, too, a peculiar excitement, a heightened sensitivity to things immediately about him, would convince him that she was near, turning the conscious day into a waking dream of searching, near-misses, evanescence.
Unable yet to read these things, however – left only with the fact of the loss of her – he had at first found the shack at Cliftons too painful. He had gone there soon after they had separated, for the very purpose of finding what it still held of her, but the strength of the traces had been too much. The sheets, the pillows seemed still to carry the scent of her. Even the smell of the untreated timber seemed mingled inextricably with her own. He hastened away, that time, and did not go back until other things suggested to him that she had not, after all, left him entirely. When he came back again he found that, uncannily, inexplicably – but he no longer sought explanations – the freshness of her presence was still undiminished, as if she had been there while he was away, or were somewhere in the air or bush about him, invisible, watching.
The new house, then, built at this time, was less a means of recovering, or of laying over the trace of her, than a way of fulfilling a promise he might have made. And so that the freshness, the presence could be undisturbed there, and another promise kept, the shack was retained – a place where he would sometimes still sleep when he went up alone, and where he could keep things that he brought there for her: as though, leaving them there, there were a chance that she would find them, know why they had been left. For this reason (though it reminded him also of Isobel and Venice – indeed it seemed to bless them in retrospect, to clear and forgive) he brought to the shack the vase of cobalt blue Murano glass that had seemed to summon him from the window of a Goulburn Street dealer, and set it on a window ledge where, for two or three years, it caught and held the light until, unthinking, he took it up to the new house, because of the bird that had built its bower under the verandah. It was a month later that he and Margaret had left the door open while they went out on the river, and returned to find that this same bird had wandered into the house and, unable to find its way out, had thrashed and crashed its way about the room until it had exhausted itself, bringing down books and crockery and smashing the blue vase into pieces that, ironically, might have been perfect for its bower, had they not been so treacherously sharp. The shattered glass. The cooped bird’s terror. There was no avoiding the doubleness, no escaping the reading of signs. What, he wondered, sweeping up the blue shards, had he done to her? What was the vase? How had it been wrong, to want it so?
If at last it lessened, this doubleness, this presence-in-absentness – if he did, eventually, find himself less vulnerable to registrations of the changes in the life of someone he could not see, could not touch, could not speak to – it was only when he could tell himself that he was, after all, an aging man, nearly seventy, whose mind was increasingly in thrall to the needs of his own body, and that to continue as he had – as that had – would have been to turn the very consciousness of her into a ritual, a predictability, and so into what she was not and never had been. So from the years of being doubled, intensified, weighted by the strength of his own feeling, he came to find himself sometimes delightfully, sometimes even thrillingly ambushed by it, precisely because he had been able to turn at last from it, finding her where he had forgotten she was, or might least have expected her to be – no longer as someone who, by their very lack of demanding, had l
ed him to demand so much of his own heart, but as an old and beloved friend in whose unpredictable if not unexpected company he could share, with wordless ease, a moment, a fragment of being – as in finding a ripe persimmon overhanging a country path, or seeing, high over the waves at Clovelly, a huge sea eagle.
He had taken to wearing white and sitting on one of the green wooden benches under the ragged Clovelly pines near the Surf Club, watching the sea. On good days, at least, and a high proportion of them were good. When the weather kept him indoors he would sit in the enclosed front verandah of the house up on Kingmont Street, where the view was even better but he did not have the fresh ocean air or sound of the waves and gulls and children playing, or the warm play of sunlight on his skin. He had stopped shaving long ago and his beard, turning white with his hair, had at a moderate length stopped growing, and so given him one less thing to be troubled with. The stroke which had slowed his left hand and leg and brought a slight droop to the left side of his mouth had spared his speech but he was in any case less and less inclined to use it, reluctant to interrupt the quiet conversation that seemed always to be going on in his own mind with the people who would visit or had come to live there, chiefly Jennifer, although he might also have said Her, since names had become less necessary and the borders between people more permeable than they once had been – either that, or it was because the people themselves were spreading, exceeding their boundaries. When it was nearly time for lunch, which he might otherwise forget, Margaret would walk down the two hundred yards from the house to fetch him, sitting a few moments beside him before starting back. And in the afternoon, after a small, quiet meal and perhaps answering a letter or reading the newspaper – he rarely pursued the news beyond a column or two, having long ago realised that everything was a matter of the random repetition of more or less predictable particulars, so that a front page, if one wished to do so, could be reduced to an arithmetical formula – the same pattern applied. Margaret still taught, at the house, two afternoons each week. On Tuesday mornings she would shop, and sometimes, when there were clothes or hardware things to buy, on Fridays. A young Italian woman came on Thursdays to clean and do the laundry while Margaret went in to the City to lunch with friends.
For several years after the move from Strathfield, Daniel had grown tomatoes, beans, pumpkins, silver beet, potatoes and other vegetables in a small plot at the bottom of the yard, protected from the wind and salt air. One day – the shortest, the strangest there had been – there was the stroke, and Margaret, a few weeks later, persuading him to sell Cliftons. One day, almost a year after, he stopped working in the garden, and they announced that the Queen would come to open the new Opera House, and Margaret, on impulse, bought him a white hat, genuine Shantung, to replace the straw gardening hat he wore under the pines, and asked him whether he would go to the opening but he wouldn’t. One day, thinking of the slowness of his walk, she bought him a sleek black cane. One day, a Tuesday, only a short time later, while waiting to be served a Vienna loaf at the bakery, she felt a kind of slip in the air, as if the earth had skipped one of its beats, or her heart had, and knew what it was, and ran to the beach, as best a woman of seventy can, leaving her shopping-bag behind her on the bakery floor, and found him, his head fallen forward as if sleeping, his eyes wide open, his hat crown-downwards on the grass, and a group of seagulls gathered round him, as if he had just offered them bread.
Part 5
17
Shoals
(1971–1973)
‘What does white mean?’
‘I don’t know. Virginity, I suppose. Purity. Or it may be emptiness. It depends upon whether you see white as a colour, or as the absence of one.’
***
So white, she would have them bleached, so bright, she was saying, that if ever the sunlight struck him directly there was a blur, an aura, a penumbra about him, as if he were already part of some thing not human. She had not expected this. He certainly had not been like that. Witnessing it day in and out, something within her changed too; she discovered more than forgiveness, more even than love, and would find herself, at times when they were alone outside the pub in the pre-heat of a summer morning, when she had brought her tea to have it with him in the quiet and the air, speaking to him as if he were some sort of demented prophet or hoary, crippled angel, telling him things that she could not believe she could tell him, and yet able to and willing to, wanting to, even, all the more because as he slowly turned his cane, or watched a pigeon on the footpath, there was something very unlike emptiness, very unlike stupidity in his black-Irish eyes.
***
‘A labyrinth,’ he was saying, ‘when all I ever wanted was something clear and open.’
He had brought her tea in the bedroom – he was watching the seagulls, remembering the clustering of other birds on the verandah, around the thrown seed – he had brought her tea, into the bedroom at Cliftons, with its strong scent of untreated pine and the honeyed morning light making wide, irregular quadrangles – what were they, rhomboids, trapeziums, kites? – on the slatted walls, and she had stretched, languidly, so that he lost himself a moment in the creased palm of her hand as it lay against the crumpled whiteness of the pillow. When he came back from the kitchen, minutes later, she had gone and he found her sitting out on the second step of the verandah, with the tea beside her, looking at the river. He put his tea beside hers and sat behind her, on the step above, and reached around and cupped her bare breasts in his hands, breathed the warm sunlight in her hair.
It was surprising, sometimes, what you remembered, what you forgot. He remembered, suddenly, the lines of her hand so clearly they might have been the rivers and valleys on the map of a landscape he was just about to return to.
‘A person can only tolerate so much clarity’ – this was Beeman in Chicago – ‘before they must complicate it again. The space means nothing without the labyrinth, the labyrinth nothing without the space.’
‘With the beast at its heart?’
‘I don’t know. The beast is another matter. Perhaps we project the beast in order to justify the labyrinth, to explain our desire to build it.’
***
He had woken, shocked, from a dream of Isobel, and was telling it to the gulls, not audibly, but in that interminable, rambling conversation within that had been going on since the time he first began thinking. Not an erotic dream, not a dream of desire; a dream in which she was utterly there, utterly herself, his unconscious remembering vividly, having stored her in such detail that a person he can barely remember by daylight was by night, that night, his intimate familiar. They had argued long and passionately about the woman on the ship. Isobel was pleading, shouting at him. ‘Don’t you understand?’ she had cried, out of that look of the hunted animal. ‘Don’t you see?’ And now he was thinking of her as he had not in years, and of Margaret, later, and Jennifer’s dream. The heart is so huge, he thought, and so strong, amazed at how much it contained, how it had not broken, collapsed under the strain: his heart, Margaret’s, Jennifer’s, hers.
***
‘You must hate me.’
‘Yes. Perhaps, at some level.’ – it was Margaret, saying it at last, but was it true? ‘Perhaps at some level every woman hates every man. But I have given what wanted to be given. It is what was, and what happened.’
***
‘I can tell you about Angus. He is sitting in front of you. He went to Hell. Not his fault, how he got there. Or maybe it was. Maybe it was a punishment all along. But it seems so unfair. He was sent to Hell, and did what he could, and Hell was his reward. How do you explain that? I can’t. I have tried. You go into something like that, you know?’ – Angus was talking about the War, it seems, but it was confusing; sometimes the War was with Claire – ‘and you have to have something to meet it. Something in you. I didn’t, and it filled me up with itself.… But who can say? I betrayed – but it seemed the betrayal went deeper than that. That she betrayed me. Or someone did. Or we were both betra
yed. Set up, by something in the fabric of things …’
***
The flowers in Barcelona, the great bouquet of red roses, their petals teased out, opened, so that they looked like a flower that never was, and golden tiger lilies, deep purple irises. He had run to find her, to bring her there, and they had stood watching it, being swallowed by it, feeling it bruising them. That is where he comes from, the architect, he said, that fire. And you? she said, Is that your fire too? No, he answered, My own is twig fire and branch fire, stick fire more like it, the shapes made in fire from bits of wood gathered at dusk from the scrub, or the forest, burning into the huge dark.
***
I miss your mouth, she said.
I want to taste you, he answered, is that what you mean? I want to taste, and taste …
***
‘You must not blame yourself. Or rather, blame yourself, for we all must, we are all to blame; but you should know that that is the easier part. We must also blame the stone, for unless we blame the stone, and call it what it is, the stone will never release us.’
***
‘You must not blame God!’ – Angus Anderson had come to a hard place – ‘You must not blame God for what man himself has done! Man’s love for God would mean nothing without the freedom to behave stupidly. You must not think that it is God who has abandoned Man when it is Man who has abandoned God, or has usurped His name in the pursuit of unspeakable perversity. You must not complain that He has ceased speaking when it is man who has ceased listening,’ and then leant back himself, as if he too were about to laugh, having finished the story.
